University got me into the classics. If I read something that isn’t work-related news, it’s almost always the classics. Novelty is a reading criterion I don’t understand, let alone various awards like the Nobel or the Finlandia. There are still plenty of classics I haven’t read. I hunger for them.

The same is true of sociology and philosophy. I make repeated efforts to reduce the size of my bookshelf. I take everything that isn’t a classic to second-hand bookshops. I am looking forward to devouring books such as Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments and Hegel’s Science of Logic.

Fiction is delicious. For example, the works of Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Aesthetically sensitive writing is pleasing. Nothing else really matters.

At the beginning of the 2000s, I wrote a column where I made a promise for my next five books. Quite surprisingly, I have actually written three of them. Of the missing two, one is a collection of essays on non-economics. The other is a fictional novel called Helena, a modern-day story about the cause of the Trojan War.

Perhaps I can’t even write fiction, but I figured I would try. I am trying to convey as much passion as I possibly can in the book. It will of course take years to finish, but I’ll keep studying all that time: I will read Shakespeare and Homer , ha-ha, so that even if the novel never happens, I’ll have another excuse to read the classics.